Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Because deep down, they maybe looked at Syria, they looked at Chechnya, and were explaining that through the fact that there was basically such a big cultural gap and difference between Russians and those countries and those nations.
But my understanding, at least, most of them had difficulty imagining the war of that proportion and that sort of ferocity and that sort of war crimes and on that level.
By rebellion, absolutely. And that was the story pretty much before 1991. So what you see since 1991 and what you see today is, I would say, a new factor, certainly in Ukrainian modern history. Because Ukrainians traditionally were very successful rebels. The largest peasant army in the civil war in the Russian Empire was the Makhno Army in southern Ukraine.
And one revolt, Cossack revolts and other revolts, one after another. But Ukrainians had historically difficulty actually maintaining the sort of freedom that they acquired, had difficulty associating themselves with the state.
And what we see, especially in the last two years, it's a quite phenomenal development in Ukraine when Ukrainians associate themselves with the state, where Ukrainians see a state not just as a foreigner, as historically it was in Ukrainian history, not just someone who came to Ukraine,
to take, but the state that is continuation of them, that helps to provide security for them, that the Ukrainian armed forces, even before the start of this war, had the highest highest support and popularity in Ukraine. The state today functions unbelievably effectively under attacks and missile attacks against city government and local government.
And we are witnessing, when it comes to Ukraine, we are witnessing a very important historical development where Ukrainians found their state for the first time through most of their history and tried to make a transition from successful rebels to successful managers and state builders.
NATO was a big part, certainly, of the Russian justification for the war. That was the theme that was up there in the months leading to the aggression. The truth is that, and Vladimir Putin went on record saying that, that the Western leaders were telling him again and again that, there is no chance for Ukraine to become a member of NATO anytime soon.
Russia was very effective back in the year 2008 in stopping Ukraine and Georgia on the path of joining NATO. There was a Bucharest summit at which the US president at that time, George W. Bush, was pushing for the membership. And Putin convinced leaders of France and Germany to block that membership.
And after that, membership for Ukraine and for Georgia was really removed from the realistic agenda for NATO. And that's what the leaders of the Western world in the month leading to February 2022 aggression were trying to do. to convey to Vladimir Putin. What he wanted there was an ultimatum that really was there not to start negotiations, but really to stop negotiations.
He demanded the withdrawal of NATO to the borders of 1997, if I'm not mistaken. So completely something that neither leaders would accept nor the country's members of NATO would accept. But for me, it's very clear that that was an excuse, that that was a justification. And what happened later in the year 2022 and 2023 certainly confirms me in that belief.
Finland joined NATO, and Sweden is on the way to joining NATO. So Finland joining NATO increased border between Russia and NATO twofold and probably more than that. So if NATO is the real concern,
it would be probably not completely unreasonable to expect that if not every single soldier, but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland. So I have no doubt that no one in Kremlin, either in the past or today, looks favorably or is excited about NATO NATO moving or the countries of Eastern Europe joining NATO.
But I have very difficult time imagining that that was the primary cause of the war. And what we see also, we talked about Tucker's interview, He was surprised, but he believed that Putin was completely honest when the first 25 minutes of interview he was talking about relations between Russia and Ukraine, was talking about history. That was also the main focus of his essay.
The essay was not on NATO and Russia. The essay was on Russia and Ukraine. So that is where the real causes are. The broader context is the fall of empire and process of disintegration of empire, not the story of NATO.
The immediate goal in 2014, when the war started, was to stop the drift of Ukraine toward the West and outside of the Russian sphere of influence. The invasion of perceived the same goals, keeping Ukraine in the Russian sphere of influence. Once we have the resistance, quite effective resistance on the part of Ukraine, the Rammstein and coalition, international coalition in support of Ukraine,
Then we see the realization of Plan B, where parts of Ukrainian territory are being annexed and included in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. So the two scenarios don't exclude each other, but if scenario number one doesn't work, then scenario number two goes into play.
The first hours and the first days were the most difficult psychologically. The rest of the world really didn't expect Kiev to last for more than a few days, didn't expect Ukraine to last for more than a few weeks. And all the data suggested that that's what would happen. Ukraine would collapse, would be taken over.
Putin called his war a special military operation, which suggests also expectations about the scope, expectations about the time. So semi-military, semi-police operation. So every reasonable person in the world believed that that would happen.
And it's the heroism of quote-unquote unreasonable people like Zelensky, like the commander of Ukrainian Armed Forces Zeluzhny, like mayors of the cities Klitschko and others. I'm just naming names that are familiar to almost all of us now. But there are thousands of those people, unreasonable people, who decided that it was unreasonable to attack their country
Showing 221–240 of 375 · page 12 of 19
← Previous
Next →